My mother is obsessed with the Pope. Of course she is. She’s 86, Catholic, and Polish. She’s had the Global Catholic Network filling the television screen full-time since Wednesday, when the Pope began his visit to his homeland.
Hey, we all have our obsessions, and she’s certainly welcome to hers. But what’s driving me crazy, is she tries like crazy to make it mine. She wants every episode of his trip videotaped, but, of course, she doesn’t know how to work a vcr, even if I set it to the channel and tell her to press “record” when she wants to start taping.
And it’s not just the Pope. It’s everything she believes that I don’t; everything she sees as desirable that I don’t. It’s been like this all of our lives. So, why, my friends often ask me, am I doing this.
Why do I live across the hall, almost constantly available to someone I wouldn’t have as a friend if she weren’t my mother? My only answer is — because she is my mother. When I needed her financial support she was there for me. When my kids got sick and I had to go to work, she got on a train and came up to take care of them. She’s my mother. In my family, we take care of our old people for as long as we can.
It just seems so bizarre to me these days. My country’s a mess. We are on the verge of destroying the planet. Yet, each day of my life is a separate reality, a world unto itself — decisions to be made, appointments to keep, food to prepare. I do what has to be done and find small ways to give myself something to keep myself going. I blog. I take sewing workshops (just started making a “bog coat”). I get ready to sell my shawls and hats at what probably will be my last craft fair. I begin taking over a partnership in a local dance magazine for which I write — which will mean more writing, more editing, learning how to do some things in Quark, and getting out to cover dance events in the region. I keep trying to create a life that has creative meaning for me around an existence that has at its core major responsibilities for taking care of someone who adds very little to what my life is or can be.
I tell my friends that, if there’s such a thing as karma, I’m building up some major stash of it. And, if there isn’t, well, I guess I will feel that I’ll have done what I believe was the right thing to do. Because I do believe in the golden rule. Because I can’t save the world, but I can make one person’s life — at least the last part of it — a little easier.
But I’m sure glad this Pope stuff is going to be over today. Then she can just play the tapes over and over again. She does know how to press “play” and “stop.”

Burningbird pointed to an Open Letter to America from a Canadian published in the Baltimore Chronicle that holds the mirror of truth up to the face of America. I don’t disagree with anything he says. No wonder I’m depressed. This is only some of what he sees reflected out to the world by this sad excuse for a free democratic nation:
With your government’s support, crooked multinationals like Monsanto buy up the world’s water supplies, and take possession of the world’s vegetation through Frankenstein technology already known to cause illness.
Does the FDA care about any of this? It does not. It has long been on the bandwagon to foist genetically altered food on the Guinea Pigs of the country–including every man, woman and child on America’s increasingly toxic soil.
You are a nation of suckers, America, to be bled dry of your hard-earned pay through outrageous bank schemes, Wall Street rip-offs and fake government budget grabs. Your Pentagon cannot account for trillions in lost dollars.
Does this bother you? Not in the least.
Your whole economy is controlled by what is for the most part ravenous, international private banking interests in the form of The Federal Reserve, which with your government’s consent leads you down the garden path to certain financial ruin thanks to a national debt you will never be able to repay.
How is it that private banks are responsible for issuing your currency? How is it that they are allowed to charge ridiculous interest rates on what they issue? By decree, this was supposed to be the responsibility of your government, which could create its own currency without charging interest.
Do you realize your congress could dismiss these banks in an instant if it so wished? But don’t ever count on it. More important matters are pressing. The upcoming election needs investment.
These very same money men are the ones who, through unmonitored and unrepresentative world committees, are driving countries like Argentina into hopeless debt and social upheaval. These greedy overlords are creating strife and suffering on a scale too tragic for words in nation after nation. Just look at Africa.
Read the rest here. It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I don’t feel fine.

An interesting comment from a female friend of mine, whose male live-in significant other has just finished undergoing treatment for prostate cancer, which included injections of female hormones. He tends to be a pretty aggressive guy, and he reported that he could actually physically and psychologically feel his aggressiveness diminishing as the hormones took effect. Just another example of how we are at the mercy of our biology and chemistry. (And maybe how we don’t have to be if we don’t want to. And I’m not advocating that aggressive men take female hormones!)

As b!X quotes from a Harper’s article by Lewis Lapham, who refers to the Wall Street Journal’s reference to America’s lost “ethical compass,” I think about how so many of the “compasses” that we humans have built to guide our journeys are also lost — or at least malfunctioning. The religions that were supposed to point the way toward moral, caring, inspiring behaviors don’t work when and where they’re most needed. The educational systems that are supposed to point the way toward meaningful, fulfilling, life-enhancing work and life-enhancing lives have lost the sense of that direction. The sciences to which we look for answers and solutions are being swept away by the greedy seas of politics and markets. The family, clan, and tribal systems that once guided, protected, and nurtured our hearts are rusting away.
So, what do we have left? Maybe only our individuals selves and what stabilizing connections we can forge with other individuals. Maybe only our shared readings of the stars to keep us from drowning (or from drowning alone). Am I feeling Apocalyptic? Yes I am.
Meanwhile, I’m glad that I gave b!X a subscription to Harper’s for last Christmas/Solstice. He always pulls out the really good stuff.

On the surface, she’s probably as unlike me as possible: she’s younger, I’m older; she’s loves the cutting edge of various technologies, I’m lucky if I can put the code in for a link without screwing it up; she’s not into “girly” things; I color my hair blonde, wear make-up, and have closets full of clothes and shoes (including sexy ballroom dance stuff); she’s not into having kids; I’m really into my two and my new grandson; she likes Tolkein, I like Zimmer Bradley. She’s happily married; I’m once-married-long-ago and now happily single. She probably drinks coffee (don’t all techies?) and I only drink tea. But I’ll bet that if we sat down with each other across our libations of choice, we’d find that we laugh at the same things; want the same things from the world in general and the opposite sex in particular; and have very strong senses of who we are, where our strength and “power” lie, and how we want to exercise them. We also use our voices, clearly, confidently, and appropriately. I it would be interesting to find out how those voices harmonize in a two-way conversation. It’s not likely to happen, given where we live and how we live. But I still think it would be way cool!

Dorothea Salo makes the following comment on Blog Sisters to Denise Howell’s post (see previous post here):
I really want to feel cynical about the rah-rah aren’t-women-great tone of this article. I really do. I really do.
But damn it, I am more ethical than many of my male counterparts. I do like my current all-female work environment better than the mixed ones I’ve been in. And I have toyed with finding a way to do things right on my own, since whenever I get hired to do things I end up forced to do them wrong.
I know some great guys and some terrible women, I admit. (I left my last job in large part because of a real dragon lady.) Still, I have to admit I think this article is on to something. Whether it’s all she’s cracking it up to be I’m not sure — but there’s a nugget of truth there
And I add the following:
Having fought the good fight back in the seventies, having worked for a dragon lady and a superb female manager (but not one male boss who could hold a candle to the latter), and now watching and reading about where women in the workworld are today — their struggles, their frustrations, the attitudes toward them — I see that we haven’t come a long way at all. The “good” guys out there understand what’s going on and don’t perpetuate the “good o’l boy, boys-will-be-boys” crap. The rest of ’em? Well, I for one am not going to let them get away with it. We should have the right to own our powerful female sexuality and not be demeaned for it, even in a (supposedly) spirit of public playfulness. (I do, however, believe that anything goes in private between consenting adults.)
I repeat all of this here because I think it needs to be repeated. Over and over again in many different forms and forums.

(The title of this post is a Comment to Halley’s Suitt’s well-written piece.)
My thanks to Blog Sisters colleague Denise Howell who quoted a section other than what follows from an excellent article by Margaret Heffernan in the August edition of Fast Company: The Female CEO ca. 2002.
I’m using the following quote because it describes just one of the many effects that sexist male attitudes have on women who really don’t want to be treated as ‘babes’ (well, except maybe in some playful private moments.)
‘Neutron Jack’ Welch and ‘Chainsaw Al’ Dunlap may have inspired men, but macho leadership styles continue to alienate women. The Boom Boom Room of Smith Barney was more luxurious than the cubicles of software startups, but I’ve talked to too many women in both environments who have been — and who continue to be — subjected to routine sexual harassment. I’ve even unwittingly hired some of the perps — liberated guys who definitely know better.
The truth is, the macho exhilaration of coding through the night holds no charm for female engineers. For women executives, racing rental cars around the hotel parking lot is not a cheap thrill. But you will find women enduring these events — sometimes even competing to join them — because they know that it’s where the important information always surfaces. When women are asked to name the most significant factors that are holding them back from advancement, the top two answers are ‘exclusion from informal networks of communication’ and ‘male stereotyping and preconceptions of women.’
Nuff said.

Tom Shugart, one of my contemporaries in Blogdom, is still trying to get a Comment feature on his weblog, so I often simply email him such things. Here he refers to what I sent him in one of my emails. And I point this out because it supports the direction of my ruminations about what kind of men are truly attractive to women, make us want to open our arms, our hearts, and our other body parts to what they offer us and the world.

….I get taken up short by something like this and then really get annoyed — at the everything from the juvenile attitude and form of expression to the impact that such (even though small potatoes compared to what we get in the popular media) has on how the world objectifies women. And then I wind up in an email blitz that really doesn’t change anyone’s mind and wastes too much of my time and energy on such “boys will be boys” posturing.
Maybe it’s because someone at Blog Sisters recently referred to the Native American focus on the Seventh Generation. The Native American Seventh Generation philosophy says that decisions you make today (and also the behavior you model) should take into consideration the impact that these decisions (behaviors) will have on the next seven generations to come after us.

I’ve been gathering up the children’s books that I still have from when my kids were young to give to my grandson. (I know that he’s not old enough yet, but I need to make room in my bookshelves.) I have copies of an illustrated two-volume set of Grimm’s and Anderson’s fairy tales that were mine from the 1940s, and a Mother Goose book that was my daughter’s in the 60s. At b!X’s request ages ago, I sent him his Winnie the Pooh and Dr. Seuss books, so Little Lex is on his own for them.
Oddly enough, b!X called me tonight asking if I still had a book that he remembered from his childhood that included the rhyme about Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod. I had been looking all over for that book but hadn’t been able to figure out what I did with it. As we were on the phone and he was describing the book — big, blue, in a slip-in cardboard cover — I looked over in the corner of my bookcase, and there it was: a 1955 edition of The Illustrated Treasury of Children’s Literature, edited by Margaret Martingnon, still in great shape. He’s trying to track a copy down so that he can read the stories to the toddler that he takes care of. Our family heirloom copy, of course, will go to Lex. But I think first I’m going to read through it, again, myself.
I wish that I knew what became of a large-sized nursery rhyme book I had as a kid. The one thing I remember was a rhyme about a girl who played with matches, and there was an illustration of her running away with her hair on fire and a look of sheer terror on her face. And another about a girl who was always stretching her neck and watching what everyone else was doing. The illustration at the end was of this girl with a neck so long that she had to wheel her head around in a wheel barrow. I had nightmares about those rhymes for years. I can still visualize the illustrations. I’d love to look at them now and see if they’re still as scarey as they seemed back then. I have a feeling I got rid of that book because I didn’t want my kids to have nightmares too. Hmph.
As final note, one of the books I left as part of my bookcrossing.com stuff was picked up and logged in on that site. This is so cool!